Sochi’s Relentlessly Cheerful Army of Volunteers

One bright morning a few days ago, Svetlana Sidorenkova was sitting on an orange chair tall enough to be a lifeguard stand, shouting exhortations of enthusiasm at passersby. “Enjoy yourselves!” “Everything is going to be great!” “Welcome to Sochi!” Spectators were filing into the Roza Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the men’s slopestyle event at the Sochi Winter Games, and Sidorenkova was determined to keep them upbeat. She told a frowning boy not to look so sad; a moment later, she launched into a fusillade of cheers so intense that a Russian police officer—a group not known for its bonhomie—burst into laughter.

Sidorenkova is twenty-six, and she works as an engineer in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals. (“Do you know it?” she asked. “We had the meteor land on us last year.”) She saw an announcement there soliciting volunteers for the Olympics, and figured it was worth a try: she likes to snowboard, she felt she could benefit from a chance to practice her English, and she wanted “to spend time with positive people.” After several rounds of training, which included lessons on the history of the Olympics, how to interact with the disabled, and so on, she was on her way to Sochi.

The twenty-five thousand Olympic volunteers have proven to be one of the bright spots at the Games, a ubiquitous and relentlessly cheerful collection of young people who, in their sheer numbers, have left a strong impression on visitors. For those accustomed, not without justification, to a Russian service culture defined by embittered indifference, the volunteer corps has come as a revelation. The volunteers, Sidorenkova suggested, could help to create a different “image” of Russia for foreign tourists. “We’re kind, open for communication, we know all kinds of languages, we’re ready to help you,” she said. “Many people think Russians don’t smile, but we do.”

Even during the moments of greatest skepticism toward the Games—when, for example, arriving journalists discovered their hotels were still under construction—there was nearly unanimous praise for the eagerness and resourcefulness of the volunteers. They seem undaunted by all the talk of cost overruns and corruption, environmental damage, political repression, or Russia’s much-publicized ban on “gay propaganda.” Somehow, at this point in the Games, not to reciprocate their unstinting enthusiasm feels like an act of personal rudeness.

Since the festivities began on February 7th, Russian organizers have managed to quarantine the nastier, and more political, elements of the Sochi Games, such as the three-year jail sentence given to a local environmentalist, Evgeny Vitishko, last week. The brief detention of women from Pussy Riot on Tuesday reintroduced a note of protest, disrupting the impression of an Olympics that had been proceeding—to the surprise of everyone, perhaps even the hosts—without much fuss or incident. Vladimir Putin must surely be pleased that nearly all those strolling around the massive Olympic Park and riding the new railway up into the mountains seem more concerned with Russia’s medal count than with questions about how that rail and road link ended up costing more than eight billion dollars.

Even many of Putin’s sharpest critics, like the opposition activist Alexey Navalny, have taken the Olympics as a moment for apolitical, patriotic enthusiasm—just because Putin is rooting for the Russian hockey team doesn’t mean he can’t also do so. With their irresistible patience and cheer, Sochi’s volunteers may also help shift perceptions of the Games away from Putin and his personal glory—making the grand spectacle of Sochi feel like something worth celebrating, no matter your opinion of the Kremlin’s political moves.

“No less is expected of us than of the athletes,” Maria Vorobeva said one night in front of the Iceberg Skating Palace, the low-slung arena that is home to the competitions in ice skating and speed skating. Vorobeva is twenty-three, and came to volunteer in Sochi from Moscow, where she works as a sports reporter. During the Olympics, she is helping out in the press office, where, she told me, the requests from foreign journalists have ranged from “Where can I get a coffee?” to “Please explain the difference between a quadruple toe loop and a quadruple Salchow.”

The volunteers are lodged at hotels along the Black Sea coast and up in the mountains—making these Games the first time that a host country has put up Olympic volunteers, rather than expect them to find their own accommodations. This gives the volunteer encampment the feeling of a gigantic summer camp or college dorm, with lots of romance, dance parties, and ping-pong games at 6 A.M. One morning near the Olympic Park train station, I met a nineteen-year-old university student in pink sunglasses named Anastasia Grishina. “It happens every now and then that we sleep,” she joked. She was on her way up to Krasnaya Polyana, the site of Olympic alpine events, for an eight-hour shift. She said she has picked up some new English words from the snowboarders, including one she had to explain to me: “bonnet,” a Britishism for the hood of a car. Grishina is from Orel, a town a few hundred miles south of Moscow. The day she left for Sochi, it was thirteen degrees below zero; when she stepped off the plane, it was sixty-two degrees along the Black Sea. “My first day here, I saw all the palm trees. It was strange. I had to wonder where I was, walking around outside with no coat and an ice-cream cone,” she said. “My sister asked me not to talk about it anymore.”

One night near the entrance to the Olympic Park, I met a group of non-Russian volunteers: one was from a resort town in Bulgaria, another from Bayside, Queens. They all said that they were having a blast. Greg Ward, twenty-eight, is from London, and also volunteered at the 2012 Summer Games. He wanted to come to Sochi to wrap his mind around “a totally different culture.” What has he picked up so far? “In England, we love to stand in a queue,” he said. “In Russia, their culture and nature is that they don’t really know about queues.” Azad Patel, a twenty-three-year-old medical student from Gujarat, India, told me that he was intrigued by how the locals size up one another. At home, he explained, “We are looking at faces.” But the Russians, he said, “look first at shoes—if your shoes are clean and neat, then it makes a good first impression.” Patel had just shaken hands with Putin outside of the Canada House in the Olympic Park. “We were just chilling, snapping pictures,” Patel said, when he and his friends saw Putin walking toward them. Patel showed me a video of him in a crush of people with Putin; during their one-second interaction, Patel gave him a key chain.

But not everyone is so enthusiastic. According to activists and lawyers, many of Sochi’s municipal workers have been pressed into volunteer service—involuntarily—for the duration of the Games. Taisiya Semeneva, a twenty-three-year-old, told me that she had quit her job at a youth center run by the city of Sochi, after her bosses drew up a new contract that included a promise to volunteer at the Games. She was unwilling to participate because, she said, “I saw how the preparations for the Olympics took place”—the forced resettlement of locals, unpaid salaries for migrant workers, environmental damage—“and this, for me, ruined the mood of the celebration.” Plus, she said, it felt “dishonest” to keep getting her salary for one job while doing another. Nearly all her colleagues said yes; the other day, she told me, she saw one directing buses on the street. It was not the first time her municipal youth center was called in to help. Semeneva told me that, last fall, when L.G.B.T. activists wanted to hold a protest in Sochi’s Komsomolsky Square, the city administration instructed her organization to apply for a permit to use the site on the same day.

Ten days in, the Sochi Games are an example of how, sometimes, the ersatz can become real and a Potemkin village can, however unexpectedly, fill with people. For an Olympics that caused many to wonder, for a time, if it would happen at all—would there be snow? would the newly built arenas sink into swampland?—Sochi has turned into more or less what it was supposed to be: an Olympic Games. Russia is justly proud of this. The Games are neither a glorious celebration of Putinism nor an unmitigated disaster, but rather, in their ostentatious exuberance and sentimentalism—combined with careening last-minute improvisation—about as fitting and honest a mirror of today’s Russia as one could imagine.